WaterCooler Neuroscience

Tea is an almost universal drink across the world with tea trading having shaped huge portions of history. This episode won't be that grand but the hosts are going to break down a recent study that investigated how heavy tea drinkers have their brain networks altered in both the structure and function over the course of decades of drinking. Wilf and Jordana talk about what you can expect from drinking tea and when claims just need to be left alone

Music doesn't always have to be emotional, music can just be a boring collection of notes and yet that is very rare. Even the beginning melody of a sound can bring about an enormous range of emotions for people, depending on the context, social situations and culture. This episode brings you a discussion of how different music was used to colour the perceptions and moods of participants watching a short video. The hosts unpack what we can tell about how we understand music both with brain data and without, and we also discuss how some brain imaging findings can be very deceptive.

You may not expect the babbling of baby bats to be a topic for a neuroscience podcast but this week we are talking about how social calls in bats go through clear developmental stages without bats ever teaching one another. Bats learn calls, both for hunting, crying out and social calls not through being taught like humans are but by just copying others around them. Our guest Dr Ahana Aurora Fernandez has spent years in the jungles of Panama learning how bats of both genders learn the male bat mating call but then only males use it once they get to maturity. What is behind this mystery? To find out more tune in or check out our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Everyone knows that humans have two hemispheres and there are famous cases of brains being split and conditions like Alien Hand Syndrome developing which bring forth arguments about if we have two or more personalities in our heads. Birds also have two hemispheres but their hemispheres are less connected than mammals and this leads to unusual differences in information processing. Quails are particularly special in having their hemispheres be more separate in a neurological sense before they mature and after maturity have better hemisphere communication. This means quails can prefer certain eyes, and by extension certain hemispheres, for processing information. Wilf and Jordana attempt to unpack this very confusing line of research

Our brains tell stories about everything, from how we got to work to how we have spent the last decade of our life. In this episode, we are talking about how our brains and more specifically the hippocampus tracks the way that characters in stories move from scene to scene. Brendan walks us through his research and also how we can understand the pattern of activity we see for the main character versus the many different patterns of activity that we find for the side characters in the background. To find out more tune in or check out our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Crying is a normal human function seen in people all across the world but there is quite a bit of difference in how and when people cry depending on their physiological, psychology, culture and gender. In this episode, we unpack the psychology and neuroscience behind crying to see what the research says about crying, and what is just 'common knowledge'

A channel update for October 2021 by Wilf Nelson

Hi, Wilf Nelson has just completed his thesis and is taking a short break to complete his PhD. We will be returning with new episodes in October and if you want to let us know if any topics are particularly interesting or important than check out the website at www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk and message us there.

This episode brings the conclusion of Wilf's interview with Dr Bimal Lakhani. Wilf and Bimal focus in this part of the interview on how corporate culture can clash with the scientific method, and how common that can be. They also talk about what the difference is in key skills when working for a university and when working for a company. It boils down to one key concept, soft skills. Find out why in a company lab having well developed soft skills is the key to working well, and it isn't just to play politics.

For the next part of September's releases in the Academia and Industry series, we are talking with Dr Bimal Lakhani. A postdoctoral researcher who was trained in universities but moved to work in a corporate lab. He talks about his experience of moving from the labs he trained into labs that focus on product development and how he views himself compared to the other scientists who are now employed full time by university labs. Bimal is also a senior scientist and is as high up as it gets without being a chief or board member. That means Bimal is the equivalent of your future boss for any scientist looking to make the jump. Wilf, gently, grills Bimal on what it is like to run a corporate lab and how his staff work differently in that environment compared to their PhDs.

Brains Talking About Brains is approaching the topic of pain this week. Jordana and Wilf are looking at a paper where controlled and manageable pain, a small shock to the leg, is controlled not through medication or meditation but instead a simple memory task. How much can we understand the brain's ability to control pain? In this episode, we also look at how it is not just the brain that can have its pain signals altered by doing a memory task but even the spinal cord. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

We bring you the conclusion of the interview with Mohammed Ali and how the business that you start is very unlikely to be the business you are running year on year. We talk about how the development of ideas and projects is very natural for scientists, so why wouldn't it be the same in business? We talk about how to accept the changes from the publicly funded world to the private world and actually the great freedoms that Mohammed sees when you take the plunge.

September is bringing the return of the academia and industry series as many students and academics end their contracts and move on from universities, both voluntarily and due to circumstance. This interview brings you the first part of Wilf's discussion with Mohammed Ali who is an expert in helping scientists take their research and ideas from the lab into corporate ventures. You'd be surprised to hear it isn't that different. You are still the one driving your own work, relying on your intellect and imagination to see things others don't and handling almost everything yourself which really isn't too far away from the standard lecturer's life. Mohammed also explains where those wanting to make the jump need to appreciate the differences. This isn't the usual content of the network but the last year and a half have seen unprecedented numbers of researchers leave universities and this is one of the key options.

There are definitely animals in the world that are conscious and aware, at least we can prove it to the same standard as any other human we can't talk to. There are also some animals, and other creatures from different kingdoms that we are not conscious of, again at least as far as we currently study consciousness. The usual method has been to assume a hierarchy with humans at the top, dogs a bit below, rodents below that and jellyfish even lower. This episode brings to you a recent scientific debate that such a hierarchy may not be wrong but for scientists is probably useless. We talk about the new dimensions of consciousness that are being put forward and how some animals excel in one area but fail in another. We must try to find a better way to understand how animals experience the world and do that as best as we can without using the lens of human experience. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCa

This episode is the final of the shorts from S4 of WCNeuro. In this episode we are talking with Dr Giulio Rognini about how his work helps us to understand why our limbs feel like ours, why prosthetics even as responsive as human arms don't feel like ours and what we can do to fix that with very safe implants and AI that are no smarter than your phone. Giulio and Wilf also talk about their experiences with presenting ideas in the scientific community and why they don't think the accusations of gatekeeping are automatically correct but that doesn't always mean academia is the most welcoming or nurturing place. They talk about how science has very specific criteria to be useful across the world and that means critical evaluation and defence are necessary. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

In this episode, Jordana and Wilf are diving into the world of experimental brain imaging. The paper of today's episode looked into how people can be scanned by an fMRI, an EEG and EROS (or Event-Related Optical Signalling). All of the scanning methods have their strengths, and at times considerable weaknesses but by using them together we can make new ways to scan the brain. Wilf also talks about his experience in an imaging lab and why scanning people with all these machines at once isn't likely to catch on as the standard method of research but it can offer insights for labs to find budget-friendly ways to study the brain. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

This episode brings you conversations from S4 of WCNeuro that did not make it into the final season. We are talking with Dr Sebastian Musslick on his findings of how mental effort and cognitive limits in humans are probably not best related over to machines. What makes us capable and unique is not a very good model for AI and that means we have to view what we want AI to be in a very different way. Michael J Frank is also back in this episode to talk about how there is a neurological basis for the feeling that earning something yourself is much more rewarding. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Free Will has been a philosophical debate for as long as philosophical debates have existed and science has weighed in from time to time. Neuroscience really started its proper discussion of if humans are truly free with the work of Libet in 1985, although even Libet was working off earlier work. That research brought into the public mind the question of it the readiness potential, the charging up of your motor system to fire, could answer if humans are free or not. We are not 37 years after the initial study and new research is not questioning if free will is real, or if neuroscience has ways to answer the question but if the readiness potential is the best way to find out. In this episode, we dive into the methods behind the readiness potential and try to see if it is something from an era of neuroscience that we can replace now.

This month is continuing your shorts from S4 of WCNeuro and bringing you a final snippet from Wilf's interview with John Dylan Haynes. We are talking about how to make artificial intelligence we have to define what intelligence even is, to set our goalpost to reach. John knows of a task force that was set to define intelligence and the result they came up with... well, it's interesting. After that Michael J Frank is back talking about how Parkinson's patients have an unusual pattern of neural behaviour which makes it seem like they are simply not motivated. We break down why this is the case in very specific scientific language and why that really isn't the case in every other context. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk